Brain Training: the five things you didn't know about meditation

One of Australia’s leading meditation experts, clinical psychologist, Dr Paula Watkins, is thrilled to announce the launch of her Calm, Conscious and Connected online meditation course. Available online from today, the nine-week course pairs authentic teachings with cutting edge science to help modern meditators improve their physical health, emotional wellbeing and mental performance.

Ideal for beginners, as a step-by-step approach to learning what meditation is, how to do it and how it can help, or for established meditators to explore different techniques and deepen their understanding of the psychology and neuroscience behind meditation, the course brings together Paula’s background in psychology and neuroscience with the best from meditation.

“A lot of people think that meditation is a bit of an alternative practice, but in reality, science has proven that meditation has the power to transform your brain and behaviour,” said Dr Paula. “We can use meditation to manage stress, improve focus, strengthen our connection with others and gain perspective, which is more important than ever in today’s fast-paced world.”

Scientifically proven and backed by years of research, Paula has shared the five things most people don’t know about meditation and how it can shape our minds: 

1.     Meditation helps keep your hippocampus healthy to enhance learning and memory.

“The Hippocampus is a small region of the brain buried deep within the subcortex,” says Dr Paula. “It plays important roles in learning, emotion regulation and specifically helps with the consolidation of information from the short-term memory to long-term memory. In 2011, researchers at Harvard were the first to demonstrate that just eight weeks of mindfulness meditation training increased the thickness of the hippocampus.”

2.     Meditation makes your amygdala chill out (and even shrink) to help lower stress levels.
“The same team of Harvard researchers also found that mindfulness meditation decreases brain cell volume in the amygdala, which is responsible for fear, anxiety and stress,” says Dr Paula. “These changes matched with the participants’ self-reports of their stress levels, demonstrating how brain changes correlate with subjective perception and feelings as well.”

3.     Meditation helps you build a faster, fatter and fitter frontal cortex - helping to improve focus, concentration and attention.

Focusing attention on an object, like breath or mantra, is one of the central practices of meditation - so it’s no surprise that meditation should help improve our ability to focus and be less susceptible to distractions. “Improved concentration and attention is one of the most well-studied benefits of meditation,” says Dr Paula. “How this happens is actually quite simple. When we focus our mind we activate the frontal cortex and increase blood flow to this area. If we do this enough times we start to see that enhanced blood flow activity become more stable. This activity leads to the growth of grey matter which can be seen in the brains of meditators.” 

4.     Meditation helps to slow the effect of the ageing in the brain.

“The human brain starts to decrease in volume and weight as we age but research has shown that long-term meditators have better preserved brains than non-meditators,” says Dr Paula. “They have more grey matter volume and while older meditators still had some volume loss, it wasn’t as pronounced.”

“Meditation also helps to protect our telomeres, the protective caps at the end of our chromosomes. Telomeres are longest when we’re young and naturally shorten as we age. Shorter telomere’s are associated with stress and higher risk for many diseases including cancer and depend on the telomerase enzyme to enable them to rebuild and repair.  Researchers at the University of California were the first to show that meditators have significantly higher telomerase activity than non-meditators and their findings have since been replicated.”

5.     Meditation activates the insula, enhancing empathy and compassion.

“In the past 10 years, research has consistently shown that meditation enhances both of empathy and compassion in people, and these benefits are traced to a brain region known as the insula,” says Dr Paula.

“The insula is a key player in self-awareness and empathy for emotions. It enables us to be mindful of our own emotional reactions as well as better read and understand those of others.

The more empathic people are, the more the insula lights up when we witness emotions in other, and meditators show enhanced activity in the insula and greater cortical thickness in this region. More recent studies have also shown that meditation increases compassionate responses to the suffering of others.”

Offering weekly training modules which include easy-to-follow videos introducing you to the technique for the week, guided audio to help you practice, e-books sharing the psychology and neuroscience behind the techniques and workbooks, journals and calendars to help you track your progress and stay committed to your meditation practice, the course is unlike anything other available.

Membership to Dr Paula’s Calm, Conscious and Connected course costs $199 as a one-off payment, or $55 over four instalments.  This fee provides six month access to the course, as well as the exclusive members-only forum where people can interact with other participants and Paula herself.

For more information or to sign up, visit: www.calmconsciousconnected.com.